Prog rock – not for me, mate. As I mentioned in the review of So, the whiff of middle-aged, socially awkward white men is all too palpable in prog’s wilfully, almost antagonistically drawn out and meandering song structures and 25-hour-long suites which purport to narrate, for example, the perspectives of minor characters from J.R. Tolkien books, or Poseidon’s daily routine, or whatever in god’s name it is that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway claims to be about. Granted, I too may be a middle-aged, socially awkward white man, but my soul is that of a teenage girl with attention deficit disorder. I need short, sharp, discreet, arresting four-minute dopamine hits with recognisable pop-rock structures, catchy choruses, and preferably cohesive and intelligible lyrics about love, politics, or something similarly digestible. I especially like it when concise and accessible music tackles deceptively heavy themes, like Madonna grappling with her Elektra complex on “Oh Father”, or Peter Gabriel (and, as it happens, Kate Bush) pointing the finger at globalisation on “Don’t Give Up.” What I don’t like are six-minute French Horn interludes about Grima Wormtongue.
So I was shocked to discover that Kate Bush is widely considered to be prog rock and that Hounds of Love is, to some extent, a prog album. Shocked because, first, she’s a woman, and I always assumed that the existence of prog is clear evidence for the veracity of the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism; that the genre’s progenitors and afficionados are basically and inescapably detached from the rest of the human race by virtue of a neurological impairment, that they feel compelled to dive into arcane and elaborate fantasy worlds in order to escape from the intolerable stress of regular social interaction, and that they seek revenge for their affliction and subsequent marginalisation by subjecting their fellow creatures to interminable, formless rock songs about unrelatable and irrelevant topics.
But it seems that I was wrong in my assumption; women are also capable of such acts of spite, because Kate perpetrates one on the second half of Hounds of Love, with a fragmented seven-song suite which is apparently intended to narrativize… well, I’m not sure what it’s intended to narrativize. The dream of a woman who has passed out, possibly drunk, on a drifting boat? Fuck knows, but we’ll get to that later. I digress. The realisation that Kate Bush is prog particularly surprised me because, having never listened to any of her albums, I always had her down as a purveyor of 80s synthpop; unorthodox synthpop, yes, but synthpop all the same. This kind of thing indeed comprises the first half of Hounds of Love, which is where all the radio hits are. Basically, then, the album follows the template originally created by Abbey Road, which is very far from being my favourite Beatles record, as the three people who read this blog will be aware.
There are four songs on Hounds of Love which were big-selling records in the UK and, in the case of “Running Up That Hill”, later in the US. All four are profoundly weird and unlikely singles, let alone hit records. Kate Bush had form here, with the thoroughly mental “Wuthering Heights”, a shrieky ballad written from the perspective of an Emily Bronte character which somehow dethroned Abba’s “Take a Chance on Me” from atop the UK singles chart. “Running Up That Hill” didn’t quite make it to number one, but it came close enough, for a song of such sinister menace. Its incessant drums roll like threatening thunder, a ghoulish and macabre synth providing the ominous backdrop to Kate’s desperate plea for God to switch their places. She later claimed it was about the basic inability of men and women to understand each other, but I prefer to think that it’s about a couple who are unequally in love; one indifferent and in control, the other head over heels and suffering because of it.
This fundamentally fearful attitude toward love, a panic about surrendering control to and being overwhelmed by one’s own emotions and desires, is a key theme on side one of Hounds of Love. It’s the explicit topic of the title track, which again, is driven by a relentless, almost primitive and tribal sounding drumbeat, and Ted Hughes-like lyrics about a little fox fleeing from savage hounds – that is, it’s about Kate’s delicate and childlike vision of romance coming under attack from the more vital and profane forces of her Id. In the end, of course, the latter win. The sound is quite unique – I don’t know how, or by what combination of instruments, she achieved it – and her voice is striking; not exactly melodic or agreeable, in fact a little warbly and unhinged, which is in keeping with the overall theme of a middle-class British woman struggling to contain a most un-British animalism. She achieves an almost identical propulsive effect on the Celtic pound of “The Big Sky” which, if I’m not mistaken, features Irish bagpipes. This song is apparently about the simple pleasures of childhood but, again, the lyrics articulate the kind of passive-aggressive distractibility which is par for the course in a toxic relationship.
“Mother Stands for Comfort” is a brief preview of side two, a burst of proggy weirdness amidst the, well… “pop music”, if that’s what it is, of side one. It’s an eerie, stuttering piano song about the mother of a murderer who, out of maternal feeling, conceals her son’s deed rather than turn him over to the police. Passion overwhelming reason again, then, though the song is a little out of place on side one. “Cloudbursting”, however, is simply devastating. Like many of the other songs on Hounds of Love, there’s no identifiable structure – it’s driving, relentless from start to finish, powered by a staccato, almost Tourette’s-like cello. It’s written from the perspective of Peter Reich, the son of Wilhelm Reich, a twentieth century psychoanalyst who was arrested by the FBI for “seditious activity” and who died of a heart attack in prison. Ultimately, it’s about a son’s love and longing for his deceased father, and the ending in particular is overpowering. The song is not made less affecting by the fact that, by all accounts, Wilhelm Reich was a bona fide nutcase.
What remains after this succession of rather distressing and discombobulating “pop songs” is the album’s side two – or “The Ninth Wave”, as it’s apparently called – which is where Kate treats us to a fractured, dream-like rock opera. It is, I am sorry to say, positively crying out for a Freudian interpretation, which I am sadly not adequately qualified to provide (where’s Wilhelm Reich when you need him?) It starts with the gentle piano of “And Dream of Sheep” – and not for the first time, the thought occurs that there’s something of the arrestedly developed little girl about Kate Bush, a fragile and princess-like figure troubled by an inadequate integration of adult psychic forces.
This volatile libidinal energy is fully at play on the following two tracks – “Under Ice”, a highly disconcerting cello song which sees Kate skating in winter, realising that someone is trapped under the ice, and then noticing that the unfortunate prisoner is, in fact, herself; and “Waking the Witch”, a miasmatical throwback to the Salem witch trials that culminates with Kate getting drowned by a Christian mob. Maybe it would be painfully obvious to argue that “Under Ice” is about Kate’s own lust trapped beneath the chilling exterior of her frigid Englishness, or that the witch is an obvious symbol of unconscionable feminine eroticism. So I won’t belabour the point and risk losing my two remaining readers. But that’s what’s really going on here, if you ask me.
According to Kate’s own reading of the album, the girl who fell asleep on the boat and into a dream about ice and witches is now in danger of drowning, which is where the subdued and deathly “Watching You Without Me” comes in. I find the premise of this song to be absolutely horrifying; it’s about the ghost of someone who has recently died going home to their unaware and increasingly worried loved ones and trying to communicate with them but, of course, to no avail, which is how our ghost comes to realise that they are in fact dead. With these upbeat sentiments fresh in our minds, “Jig of Life” jumps in with a cheery Irish fiddle and, apparently, the voice of future-Kate come to wake her up and save her, though by this point I rather suspect that the empty bottles of red wine were beginning to pile up. With that said, Hounds of Love has two more tricks up its sleeve: the dramatic and cinematic “Hello Earth”, which Kate described as a “lullaby to planet earth” and which sees her looking down over North America as storms approach and appealing to the sailors to escape from the water; and “The Morning Fog”, the album’s closing song, which is full of life and love for her relatives, and indicates that our protagonist did, in fact, wake up at the right moment and elude a watery grave.
It’s maybe worth pointing out here that large bodies of water are recurring themes on Hounds of Love; throwing her shoes in the lake, the frozen waste of “Under Ice”, the condemned witch, the sailors scrambling for safety. Indeed, the whole of side two is the dream of a woman in danger of drowning. The basic thesis that this painfully shy, awkward, reticent, bottled-up middle-class English girl was here busily translating her considerable reservoirs (pun intended) of repressed libidinal energy into compelling pop music about the danger of being consumed by a vast, dark, uncontrollable, life-giving force is, well… maybe not something that would get me published in the Journal of Psychoanalysis. But so what. Hounds of Love is mad as hell – a harrowing, uncomfortable, frequently quite beautiful album. I greatly admire, though I rarely revisit, the prog rock opera of side two. Side one is unique in the annals of pop, and its brilliance cannot be overstated.
7/10
Highlights: “Running Up That Hill”, “Hounds of Love”, “Cloudbusting”